The Nobel Committee announced today that the Prize in physiology
goes to Mario R. Capecchi, Oliver
Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans--who developed a way to
"knock-out" specific genes in mice,
allowing researchers to figure out what each gene does in mammalian
bodies.
As the Nobel citation notes:Such gene "knockout" experiments have elucidated the roles of numerous genes in embryonic development, adult physiology, aging and disease. To date, more than 10,000 mouse genes (approximately half of the genes in the mammalian genome) have been knocked out. Gene targeting has already produced more than 500 different mouse models of human disorders, including cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative diseases, diabetes and cancer
Several IgNobels merit honorable mention as well:
Chemistry
Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan
For developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung
Linguistics
Juant
Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona
University,
Demonstrating that rats confuse Japanese spoken backwards with Dutch spoken backwards
Medicine
Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer
of Antioch, Tennessee,
Discovering that sword swallowing hurts
Peace
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio,
Developing chemical weapons to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to
each other
Aviation
Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of
Argentina,
Discovering that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in
hamsters
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